Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Sanctuary

The farmer’s horse-drawn cart had seemed like a tumbrel in the French Revolution to Max, hauling him to the guillotine. He was tired of lying on a bed of straw, no matter how fresh.

Revienne, however, relished being off her aching feet. They hung, bare, over the cart edge, swinging with the bumpy motion. Naked, rather. With pink painted toenails. A pretty sight, except for the angry red places on heels and toes where her shoes had rubbed them raw. She’d never complained.

Revienne was able to ignore him completely for the first time during their flight. He studied her exhausted profile. Brow, nose, and chin were feminine, but strong, determined. If secret assassin she was, who would she work for? Not for money, he decided. Principle. Which might seem comforting at first, but fanatic principle had proved itself a far worse influence on the modern world than mere personal gain.

He hadn’t realized he was whistling until her profile lifted and she glanced his way. She smiled. “That tune is familiar.”

He thought about it. “Not to me.”

“Ah, a secret message from your subconscious. Whistle a bit more.”

“I’ve forgotten it now.” His subconscious would not perform for free.

She shook out her hair. “It doesn’t matter. It was something Irish. Their tunes are both lilting and somber. Come now, less somber and more lilt. Admit it, you’re as happy as I am to be off your feet.”

“I didn’t know you were on my feet.”

A frown in that alabaster forehead. “I am not perfect at the English language.”

“It was a joke. I agree. Laughing is better than moaning.”

She nodded, looking away again to the deserted sweeps of green. “They say the nearest village is Zuoz. Small, but a tourist attraction when the big German buses come through.”

“Good.” He eyed a pile of fabric beside him. “Clothes?”

“At the last farm a son had left for vocational school in Zurich. It’s hard to keep the young ones in the mountain villages these days.”

He shook out a pants and shirt, and shuddered at the heavy, narrow denim pant legs. They were a new kind of cast, ones he’d have to force his long-sheltered legs into. Painfully.

“I’ll get them on to the knees.” She’d read his mind. He’d have to watch that.

He nodded.

She glanced at the hospital pajama bottoms. “These off?”

His only underwear? No way. “The pants can go on over these.”

“It’ll be bulkier, harder.”

“Just get the two legs up to my knees. When the cart stops, I’ll lower my feet to the road and . . . shimmy into the damn things.”

“Shimmy?”

“You’ll see,” he said sourly. Not his most graceful moment, he could foresee, but it couldn’t be helped.

In another half hour, he spotted the spire of a simple church in a fold of road and hill below. Gable roofs appeared next. The horse slowed from a walk to a crawl. He pulled the lightweight wool shirt over his pajama top and over his hips.

He stared down at the mountain path beneath the heavy wheels. It still seemed to pass at a dizzying pace. To jump off would be a dangerous moment for his weakened legs. He sensed that he had jumped off far more dizzying heights, absolutely fearless. A throb of self-disgust shivered through him.

“Not until the cart stops utterly,” Revienne said. Ordered. “You are still an invalid, and under my care.”

He recognized good counsel, at least, and waited impatiently, judging every shift of the wheels for the moment when he dared to stand on his own two bare feet again, clothed and on the road to independence. And danger.

The cart and its burden of hay finally rocked almost to a stop. His hands grabbed the thick wooden edge, his mind gauging the drop, his shoulders supporting him until the flats of his feet were on the rutted dirt, then his rear supported him on the edge, easing off. . . .

She raised a hand, forbidding movement, then . . . lowered it.

Max took the plunge, felt the soles of his feet touch a solid surface and the arches settle down into solid contact. He felt pure jubilation, like the first man landing on the moon. Such a simple step for a whole man, such a great step for a semicripple.

His arms and shoulders were strong enough to cushion any shock. He released an arm to grab the quaint, knotty cane.

But. You couldn’t shake yourself into a tight pair of jeans without all your weight on both legs with both hands needed at the sides and . . . front. Shit. This was worse than the delicately negotiated mountain stream sitz baths.

“Let me,” Revienne said, brusque as any nurse. “The farmer’s son was not as tall as you, but was also very lean.”

She grabbed the heavy fabric at the sides and pulled up with each fist in turn, until they rode on his hips and would go no further. The fly was a buttoned affair and she bent her head and hands to the task.

“As I said,” she murmured halfway through, “young Johannes was not as big as you.”

“Dr. Schneider,” he rebuked.

Her face looked pink behind the veils of her loosened hair, and he could tell she was biting back a . . . giggle.

She stepped away and pulled the shirt down over the skimpy pants.

His face felt red too, as if he was a green boy again. Had he ever been? He recalled an old riddle about what walked with four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening . . . He could remember stupid riddles, but not the riddle of himself.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. Primly. “Now. We must go and do what you said you would know how to do when we were among people again.”

If he remembered what that was.

Revienne was devouring half of a roasted chicken across from him, wiping her mouth with a linen napkin and gulping white wine, then pulling meat from bones a moment later.

An accordion was playing in the background. An accordion! He hadn’t heard an accordion in decades, if ever. As far as he knew. Red-faced, stout people were drinking beer and wine and eating all around them at the small bistro adjoining the village’s central, and only, inn. The language flowed like the wine and beer, soft and fluent. He caught words, some English and German, and something different. Swiss-German.

Revienne’s loosened blond hair was catching in the chicken grease at the sides of her mouth. No skinless fowl here. He’d eaten three pork chops, sauerbraten, dumplings, and cooked greens until he felt gorged. He’d ordered beer, not because he craved it, but because it would put weight on him faster. He’d lost a lot; he could tell. Odd, he knew how the man he really was should feel, but not who he really was.

He knew who Revienne Schneider thought he was.

“You must be a very bad man,” she’d said through her first, ravenous bites of chicken and dumplings and thick brown bread. Her eyes glittered at him like a wild animal’s. “An adventurer. Utterly no scruples. This is very good.” She paused for breath and to wipe her mouth. “You have no conscience at all. Pass the butter. Please.”

It was white as snow and as soft as whipped cream. He knifed off a glob to put on his own rugged loaf of bread before he handed it over to her and she took the whole mound.

“They’re tourists,” he whispered over the board heaped with varieties of cheese between them. “I’m only using each card for one item. I’ll ditch the one for dinner and lodging tomorrow. Literally bury it. It will cost the man a minimum of euros. He’ll get a notice and change the card number. We must eat and rest.”

“Yes.” She drank more wine, pulled the hair back from her face. “I need a bath. And of course you would not put two rooms on the poor tourist’s card, so we shall have to sleep together.”

Her eyes were as fevered as her face. Her tone was half accusation, half something more interesting.

“I don’t think I could heft this body into a bed tonight, princess. You’ll have it all to yourself.”

“‘Heft’? What is this ‘heft’?”

“Lift.”

“Ah.” She looked around. “We must look like savages.”

“They’re too absorbed in their own dinners to take much notice of us.”

“You’re sitting.”

“Yes.”

“That is an improvement.”

“My hips ache like the very Devil. Why do you think I’m chugalugging so much beer?”

“Chuga?”

“Swallowing fast.”

She nodded. “I’m hungry still. I’ll give you a massage tonight.”

She was back on the subject of his legs. And hips.

“I have very good hands. Strong hands.”

He drank some more beer, wanting to put on weight, feel no pain, forget about her hands on his legs and hips. She was a possible enemy. Of course she’d offer . . . things. His job was to forget his own pain and confusion, and not take any wooden nickels.

Where did that expression come from? It sounded as old as the hills, which were alive with the sound of music . . . which was not Austria, but Switzerland, which was not where he belonged.

Where did he belong? He remembered the song he’d been whistling earlier. Something about a minstrel boy and a war? Ireland. Did he belong there? He felt another deep throb of recognition, accompanied by a surge of mixed sensations: love, hatred, anger, guilt, pain. Man, the real him must be some dysfunctional bastard. Though that didn’t seem right, either. Garry Randolph didn’t seem to think so.

Revienne ate some cheese, then stuffed some into the backpacks they’d bought on the stolen credit card.

“Come,” she said, whispering across the table. “I don’t want you unsteady on your feet with too much beer. After all those meds it could hit you hard, and I’m not strong enough to get you up the chalet stairs to our room.”

He grabbed his new cane, hand-carved tourist bait that leaned against his rush-seated chair. He didn’t bother to tell her he’d been off meds for some time. Still, the stairs took two turns, there was no elevator, and the new walking shoes made his gait clumsy. He was exhausted by the time she turned the key to their room.

He leaned against the wall just inside the door while she turned on the lamps—no overhead lights in the boonies—looked into the empty freestanding wardrobe and under the double bed piled high with a down comforter.

“The bathroom is down the hall,” she said. “This is not the American Plan part of the world. But don’t worry.” She hoisted a deep white pot from under the high bedstead. “There are emergency accommodations. Mike, don’t look like that! You’re still an invalid; you must take the simplest route. I am a medical doctor, you know. I’ve seen everything.”

Yes, but not his “everything.”

“You use the bathroom first,” she decided. “I’ll help you to and fro. Once you’re in the bed, I can use it.”

It took them an hour to accomplish their separate turns at the simple room with a bathtub, toilet, and sink. It was early, so they had no competition. Max used a cloth to wash off the three days of sweat and outdoor elimination, and donned the beige shorts from a village shop with relief. Luckily Swiss mountain men wore the equivalent of short shorts in the summer, almost as good as boxers. He felt like Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I. shorts, but at least he could dump the hospital jammies in a knapsack for burying farther down the road.

The black, long-sleeved spandex turtleneck top was as silky as a second skin. The moment he put it on, he felt more relaxed. Something to his taste, apparently.

It didn’t make sense to struggle into the new, baggier jeans the stolen credit card had bought as well. Not for sleeping. Re-vienne would just have to see his pale legs, with the dark hairs rubbed off by the cast. He recalled her threat of a massage and chose to consider it a promise. He was, as she’d pointed out, an invalid.

The bedsheets were Egyptian cotton, maybe a thousand-thread count. Smooth as a baby’s cheek. The foot-high comforter was the only blanket or coverlet, and all that eiderdown was housed inside another silky, high-count shroud.

Max took deep, satisfied breaths. His stomach was full, his magic fingers knew how to lift a tourist’s credit card so smoothly no one would ever notice, the beer was making him drowsy, and he was going to let Revienne’s strong doctor-trained hands massage his abused legs.

He was half-asleep when she finished in the bathroom. She came back smelling of freesia soap and began running her hands over his aching leg muscles all the way up to the place where his butt began, where it hurt so good. . . .

This person named Max didn’t trust many or much, but tonight he fell asleep in the cradle of civilization.

Woman.

Warm.